Two sets of footnotes in InDesign

[Aditya29661206czt4]

Folks, I have a word manuscript with 8000 footnotes and about a 1000 endnotes. 

The author wants the endnotes to appear as a second set of footnotes at the bottom of every page, with star dagger series as placeholders. 

I dont want to do this manually. Any changes to text implies I'll be buried with several manual changes. 

Please advise best course of action. 

[A2D2]

Good point: if an author can't type, organise, structure, and present a text in a word processor, then one could hardly expect a designer to design it in ID unless by manual means.

I haven't been able to discover the exact publication worflow used by publishers of critical editions but it seems that scholars are indeed using specialist word processors such as Classical Text Editor (CTE) to annotate a text and produce "camera ready copy" . So publishers are missing out the typesetting/design step which helps explain why nobody in this forum  has much experience of these type of texts.

Here are some other links which may be of interest:

https://epidoc.stoa.org/gl/latest/supp-apparatus.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_apparatus

https://tei-c.org/release/doc/tei-p5-doc/en/html/TC.html

[A2D2]

I've just re-read the internal document of a major publisher that, among other things, publishes critical editions. They have been using Microsoft Word and the scholars and copy editors are tagging the elements of the document ... the specialist typesetters must then be interpreting these tags and documents to produce an appropriate layout.

Anyway, this must be the old-style work flow and the workflow used by scholars not working in specialist teams. Most humanities scholars have very little IT aptitude to even manually add XML tags to a document by hand.

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

Having worked with this segment of publishing, it's charitable to say that the academics themselves have little aptitude. 🙂 They almost always rely on the downstream chain, starting with grad students and university support departments and have absolutely no idea how their complex content ends up on a journal page. (Some of my experience is with a long-time journal editor who is no different  —"his team" did all that while he wore out blue pencils.)

So I'd double down on my assumption that these complex, nonstandard noting and organization methods are done almost entirely manually,. probably in something not far removed from LaTex or very specialized niche editors, probably with support of many, many bits of automation like scripts and macros and hard-coded formatting tools. (Created over the years by those grad students and publishing teams.)

The takeaway being, I think, that while anyone reasonably competent with ID could replicate any given page of this material, it would be with manual composition and many intricate styles... not with anything like the integral, automated tools for single footnotes and endnotes.

[Peter Kahrel]

> I'd double down on my assumption that these complex, nonstandard noting and organization methods are done almost entirely manually,. probably in something not far removed from LaTex or very specialized niche editors, probably with support of many, many bits of automation like scripts and macros and hard-coded formatting tools.

I disagree, James. The screenshot shows a title I set about ten years ago. Parallel texts (English on the left, Latin on the right), about 1,300 pages. Up to three levels of notes (not counting the margin notes). The first level I did as InDesign footnotes, the two other levels were in their own stories. Short notes were done as run-in notes. 

InDesign was perfectly up to the job, virtually everything was done with a few scripts. Many typesetters can write scripts themselves, and script writers can be hired. So there's no need to go to Latex (which would be able to deal with layouts such as these, and which is harder to script than InDesign) or any other tool.

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

We're maybe talking a bit at cross-topics; I meant journals and other very old-school publications more than any general book projects.

And yes, with sufficient skill we can do anything that can be envisioned... but I'd mildly argue that your methods are far more "manual" than what use they make of InDesign's feature. Single end and foot notes in most text tools require zero extra management, once set up; having to juggle several text flows and cross-references is skill, effort and technique of another order. And each academic discipline has its own very long list of jots, tittles, must-do's and no-no's — few of which fall into neat, automated handling of any general layout app I know of. (And I have very complex books I've done as far back as the late '90s, by similar skill-based extension of app capabilities.)

But if it was easy, we'd all be doing first novels on Fiverr, right?

[A2D2]

In the latest edition of InDesign CC is it possible to thread the endnote story accross pages? So to have two series of 'footnotes' in a document we would have as follows:

• Series 1: built-in footnotes at bottom of page
• Series 2: built-in endnotes in independent story which is threaded according at will e.g. at the end of the story, end of the book, from page margin to page margin.

Would this work?

So this would be what the Footwork v.3 plugin does?

It may be useful to keep in mind that, of course, multiple series of footnotes is a fairly basic feature in InDesign if they are relating to different stories. But the purpose of this conversation is the best way to get multiple series of footnotes for THE SAME STORY.

As has already been identified, a key consideration for multiple series of footnotes is to figure out the references for the multiple series. Some series can get pretty ugly if they get too long e.g. Roman numerals, letters, or asterisks and daggers ... but if the series is short or restarts each page it should be fine.

[Robert at ID-Tasker]

@A2D2

Can you share a sample document - can be on priv? 

[A2D2]

Hi @Robert at ID-Tasker . A sample document for what? The image I shared of Richard Fitznigel, Dialogus de Scaccario, and Constitutio Domus Regis? Sorry, i didn't do the layout so I do not have anything to share.

A point to note is that this book was typeset almost 20 years ago so somebody in our design community must have the knowledge 🙂 Maybe it was just a manual job

[Robert at ID-Tasker]

@A2D2

I'm looking for a real, complicated example file to play with - to add support for multiple sets of different kinds of Notes - foot, end, margin, etc.

I know I can do it - I just need a good material to play with. 

[yasminee95817177]

Hi @Robert at ID-Tasker.

I'm new to the community, first post here, but I just came across this specific topic while searching for any existing script allowing to handle several sets of footnotes, so if you still want a really complicated case to play with, here it is!

I'm working in a small CNRS research team working in Humanities, specifically on editing ancient christian texts, mostly in ancient greek and latin, with a layout very similar to the screenshot Peter Kahrel has posted above.

We work with InDesign for a long time now, but none of us (all scholars) is skilled enough to script and we do all the layout manually for volumes up to 700 pages... and it's a long, meticulous work, often tedious, but that's how we can get things (mostly) how we want them from a scientific perspective. We are actually considering other options, as Classical Text Editor, custom TEI encoding or even LateX, but it might be counter-productive since we're all well used to our current custom workflow and we're all overworked, and it doesn't help that a great part of the scholar work is made by academics in poorly edited Word files before we get them.

So basically, for the text and translation part of the book, we have on a double page the ancient text on the left and the parallel translation on the right -we handle manually the parallel as precisely as possible from page to page-, plus several types of notes:

• margin (side) notes that we used to create manually with anchored blocks but now we use the ID-extras script GREP to Anchored Object to automate the process
• a critical apparatus: inline notes referring to specific words in the ancient text, keyed to line numbers
• a biblical apparatus: inline notes with a, b, c note numbers and matching references, both in the ancient text and the translation
• sometimes another apparatus for ancient sources and parallela: inline notes referring to quotations in the ancient text, preceded by the line numbers
• finally, regular footnotes to help understanding the text: 1, 2, 3 note numbers and matching references in the translation, with possible overlap in the next double page. 

Obviously we can't use ID dynamic footnotes because of all the other notes that come in-between, so the four last flows of notes are chained blocks of independant threads, which means that all the notes and references are static - yes, I know. We considered using cross-references, but it's a pain in the ass to set them manually one by one and we had bad experiences with indexes made this way that considerably slowed down ID, it didn't handle well so many cross-references on several long documents in a book (but maybe this is different now with CC?).

To be honest, even if I wish to be proven wrong -and Peter Kahrel here seems to have-, I quite agree with James Gifford: I doubt that this kind of complex and fine-tuned layout with so many scientific constraints can be done all out of automation. But if you want to give it a go, or simply have in mind a script or anything that would simplify the process at any level, that would be great!  

 Any response, any advice would be welcome. Thanks!

[A2D2]

Can anybody answer this specific question?

In the latest edition of InDesign CC is it possible to thread the endnote story accross pages?

[Peter Kahrel]

The answer is Yes.

It's easy to do manually, though scripting it is probably not entirely straightforward.

[Robert at ID-Tasker]

Can anybody answer this specific question?

In the latest edition of InDesign CC is it possible to thread the endnote story accross pages?

By @A2D2

It's a Story - with an extra icon - so you can reflow it.